Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsThe Relación de Michoacán (1539–1541) & the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico. Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015, 288 pp. $25.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4773-0239-2.Laura E. MatthewLaura E. MatthewMarquette University Search for more articles by this author Marquette UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Relación de Michoacán, a 139-page illustrated compendium of P’urhépecha (Taras-acan) history and culture made by a team of Indigenous scribes and painters with the Franciscan Fr. Jerónimo de Alcalá between 1539 and 1541, is to western Mexico what the Florentine Codex and Primeros memoriales are to the Nahua central region. Indeed, the Relación predates the more famous works of Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún and his Tlatelolca informants by nearly twenty years. These are the Americas’ earliest ethnographies, even more valuable for their temporal proximity to first contact with Europe, Africa, and Asia. Much ink has therefore been spilled assessing the Relación from many different disciplinary angles. Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol focuses our attention on the context of the document’s production and the contradictions between its text and images, using methods from both the historian’s and the art historian’s toolbox. She emphasizes P’urhépecha politics at a particular moment in time over more general questions of European artistic influence, stylistic hybridity, pan-Mesoamerican cosmovision, or precolumbian history writ large.Three immediate political realities shaped the Relación’s production according to Afanador-Pujol. First, its commissioning by Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza conditioned the narrative. Afanador-Pujol suggests that the Relación’s Indigenous creators were “given … an unprecedented opportunity” (p. 104) to influence Spanish policy toward them, and tailored their presentation to their European audience for maximum effect. She interprets the inclusion of European elements such as three-dimensionality, Christian morality, knightly pastimes presented as Mesoamerican “Chichimec” traits, or the Tree of Jesse, and the sometime absence of Mesoamerican elements such as glyphic toponyms, as strategic choices designed to make the Relación’s message more intelligible. Second, labor and land disputes with local Spaniards led the Relación’s creators to emphasize the region’s unity under a single lord as a hedge against Spanish encroachment—a stance also favored by Franciscans such as Fr. Jerónimo and the bishop Vasco de Quiroga. Afanador-Pujol’s argument here is particularly strong, analyzing the migration story of the Relación’s text, the selection and placement of its images, and archival documentation of these land disputes in Spanish courts all in relation to one another.Third, and paradoxically, Afanador-Pujol detects ethnic rivalry in the contradictions between the Relación’s text and images. Based on an analysis of scribal hands, visible emendations to the pages, and artistic styles, she posits the existence of two separate groups of five scribes and four artists. The artists, she contends, generally favored the previously dominant but more recently arrived Uanacaze, whose leader had been executed one decade earlier by the Spanish. The scribes, on the other hand, appear to have followed the dictates of the leader of the older “Islander” population and acting indigenous governor of Michoacán, who was the Relación’s only named informant, Don Pedro Cuiniarangari. Again Afanador-Pujol sees strategy where other scholars have seen mistakes or mere discrepancies. She suggests that Don Pedro carefully asserted his authority while also acknowledging the Uanacaze’s power in the Lake Pátzcuaro region in the text, positing himself as an ideal intermediary between the Uanacaze, their subordinated neighbors, and the Spanish. Subsequently, the artists altered, added, or ignored the scribes’ assigned illustrations to subtly justify an eventual reassertion of Uanacaze power while maintaining the Relación’s overall message of unity. In our own era of graphic novels and neuroscientific studies of vision and memory, it is tempting to imagine Viceroy Mendoza and the king skipping over the scribes’ work and gleaning most of their understanding of P’urhépecha history and culture from the Relacion’s paintings and edited captions, storybook fashion—which Afanador-Pujol implies is just what the artists hoped would happen.This is a bold claim. I am not entirely convinced by Afanador-Pujol’s envisioning of two separate groups of artists and scribes so neatly aligned with Uanacaze and Islander points of view. Analysis of the Relacion’s interethnic balancing act sometimes overshadows another of the book’s key points: the political positioning and influential hand of Fr. Jerónimo. Nevertheless, Afanador-Pujol provides a compelling interpretation of this important text, firmly attached to the circumstances of its making with systematic, sophisticated attention to its visual details. One closes her book with a new appreciation for the delicate negotiations, contradictory and overlapping alliances, and cultural translations that Mesoamericans such as the P’urhépecha speakers of western Mexico managed in the earliest decades of European colonialism. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 73, Number 1Spring 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690535 © 2017 by The University of New Mexico. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.